authors’ workshop ”irresponsibility in world politics”
TRANSCRIPT
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Authors’ Workshop ”IRresponsibility in World Politics”
28-29th May 2019
Department of Political Science, University of Münster Monday, 27th May Arrival Tuesday, 28th May 8:30 – 9:00 Welcome & Introduction to the Workshop
Hannes Hansen-Magnusson & Antje Vetterlein 9:00 – 10:45 Session 1: Theorizing Responsibility Michael Zürn & Jelena Cupac: The Governance of Responsibility in World Society Tomer Shadmy: The Emergence of Responsibility as a Global Regulative
Concept Peter Sutch: Moral Irresponsibility in World Politics Discussant: Patrick Jackson 10:45 – 11:15 Coffee Break 11:15 – 13:00 Session 2: Responsibility in Policy Fields Steven Bernstein: The Assigning and Erosion of Responsibility for the
Global Environment Doris Fuchs & Tobias Gumbert: The Moral Geography of Responsibility: Spatially
Differentiated Practices of Responding to Collective Problems in the Global Agri-food System
David Karp: Business and Human Rights in Global Governance Discussant: Susan Park 13:00 – 14:30 Lunch Break
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14:30 – 16:15 Session 3: Actors & Stakeholders of Responsibility Susan Park: Accountability and Responsibility in the Multilateral
Development Banks Markus Kornprobst: Responsible Diplomacy: Restraint, Compromise and
Polylogue Mitja Sienknecht: The Discursive Construction and Contestation of
Responsibility Between the UN and Regional Organizations
Discussant: Mathias Albert 16:30 Transfer into the city 17:00 City Tour, including visit of the Friedenssaal 19:00 Dinner (La Californie, Picasso Museum) Wednesday, 29th May 9:00 – 10:15 Session 4: Objects of Responsibility Mathias Albert & Sebastian Knecht: A Responsibility to Freeze? The Artic as a Complex
Object of Responsibility Elizabeth DeSombre & Samual Barkin: Responsibility on the High Sea Discussant: Steven Bernstein 10:15 – 10:45 Coffee Break 10:45 – 12:30 Session 5: Taking Responsibility Further Stephan Engelkamp: Responsibility as Political Beauty? Derrida’s Ethics of
Decision and the Politics of Responding to Others Patrick Jackson: To Whom the Earth Calls: Actor-Hood, Responsibility,
and Creation Care Antje Wiener: Academic Intervention: Contestation as Political Practice Discussant: Peter Sutch 12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break 14:00 – 14:30 Discussion & Concluding Remarks Departure
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Useful Information: Workshop Location and Accommodation: Hotel & Restaurant Bakenhof: Roxeler Str. 376, 48161 Münster
Dinner Location: La Californie, Picasso Museum: Königstraße 1, 48143 Münster
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How to get from the airport to the hotel? Possible Connections: RE 2 from “Düsseldorf Flughafen” to “Münster (Westf) Hauptbahnhof” (main train station) RE 2 from “Düsseldorf Flughafen” to “Duisburg HBF” à FLX 1802 (Direction: Hamburg-Altona) to “Münster (Westf) Hauptbahnhof” RE 1 from “Düsseldorf Flughafen” to “Dortmund Hauptbahnhof” à IC 2028 (Direction: Hamburg-Altona) to “Münster (Westf) Hauptbahnhof” Having arrived at “Münster (Westf) Hauptbahnhof” you can take Bus #12 (direction: Rüschhausweg über Domplatz) or Bus #1 (direction: Roxel über Prinzipalmarkt) from the bus stop B1 which is immediately on your right when you exit the station. Get off at “Gievenbeck Kaserne”. The Hotel is 100 m down the street.
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Participant Details: Name University Email Antje Vetterlein WWU Münster [email protected] Antje Wiener Universität Hamburg [email protected] Beth DeSombre Wellesley College [email protected] David Karp University of Sussex [email protected] Doris Fuchs WWU Münster [email protected] Engelkamp, Stephan King’s College London [email protected]
Hannes Hansen-Magnusson
University of Cardiff [email protected]
Jelena Cupac WZB, Berlin [email protected] Joachim Delventhal CBS, Kopenhagen [email protected]
Markus Kornprobst Diplomatische Akademie Wien
Mathias Albert Uni Bielefeld [email protected] Michael Zürn WZB, Berlin [email protected] Mitja Sienknecht WZB, Berlin [email protected] Patrick Jackson American University [email protected] Peter Sutch University of Cardiff [email protected] Samuel Barkin Uni of Massachusetts
Boston [email protected]
Steven Bernstein Uni of Toronto [email protected] Susan Park Sydney University [email protected] Tobias Gumbert WWU Münster [email protected] Tomer Shadmy Tel-Aviv University [email protected]
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Paper Abstracts (in the order of appearance): The Governance of Responsibility in World Society Michael Zürn & Jelena Cupac In the age of globalization, a good portion of world politics has been about allocating responsibility for halting genocides, fighting terrorism, promoting democracy, feeding the starving, saving the environment, halting sexual violence against women, managing economic crisis, containing epidemics, etc. International organizations (IOs) have increasingly been allocated or have themselves assumed these responsibilities, pointing simultaneously to the willingness of states to accept obligations outside of their territory. However, IR scholarship has seldom considered IOs as responsibility holders. Similarly, the responsibility of states towards people leaving outside of their territory is little discussed. Much more attention has been given to empires responsibility holders beyond a nation and to IOs as authority holders via which states can affect developments beyond their borders. Our aim in this paper is to examine the relationship between responsibility and authority of IOs, and by extension of states, in the age of globalization. Drawing on the work of David Miller, we go about this task by first discussing different notions of responsibility allocation: causal, moral, communitarian, and capacity-based allocation. We submit that capacity principle plays a central role in the expansion of responsibility beyond nation states. On this basis, we then examine the interplay between responsibility and authority. Three possibilities are scrutinized: responsibility allocation proceeding authority allocation; authority allocation proceeding responsibility allocation; and responsibility and authority being simultaneously allocated. We supplement this conceptual exploration with numerous examples, including current developments in which the expansion of responsibility and authority beyond national borders is increasingly being contested. The Emergence of Responsibility as a Global Regulative Concept Tomer Shadmy Over the last decades, various legal initiatives, standards, code of ethical conduct and frameworks have been established in order to bridge the transnational accountability gap and impose social obligations on non-state actors and on foreign countries. Many of these instruments use the term “responsibility” in order to conceptualize the entities’ obligations toward others or towards the environment. Such instruments can be found in various fields, such as business and human rights; emerging technologies’ governance; the prevention of serious war crimes or environmental hazards. This chapter frames these different instruments as part of a new responsibility-based regulatory paradigm. By combining analytical study of the philosophical and conceptual roots of the concept of responsibility, together with tracing the social and political context of the contemporary rise of the concept, the chapter offers a unique characterization of the emerging transnational paradigm.
While jurisprudential literature tends to interpret some of these new norms, such as corporate social responsibility norms, as non-legal norms, I argue that they present a shift into a new form of transnational legal norms. These norms grant broad discretion to the powerful actor in a relationship to decide how to act, while demanding that she be in constant dialog with all the stakeholders, and take into account their voices. These norms rely less on preliminary division of labor as regards social obligations. Instead, they see every actor in the transnational arena as socially responsible, in accordance with their scope of impact on others.
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The chapter will offer a contemporary and original analysis that involves legal and political philosophy together with international law. This perspective enables to see in a new light current legal developments in the global transnational space, and to discuss the new possibilities it opens, but also the inherent limitations that come with the reliance on the concept of responsibility as a leading normative and regulatory concept. Moral IRresponsibility in World Politics Peter Sutch In 2002 Thomas Pogge, exploring developments associated with the evolution of international human rights law, noted that international law, while ‘talking the talk’ really was not ‘walking the walk’. Drawing on our moral responsibilities as seen through the prism of international legal human rights was intended to push us to close the gap between theory and practise. Pogge’s critique argued, to the contrary, that an ‘historic transformation of our moral norms has mostly produced cosmetic rearrangments’ (Pogge 2002:5). A decade or so on from this intervention the attempt to understand the relationship between moral and legal IRresponsibility – to understand why individual centred and/or community centred norms have evolved but not really altered the pattern of international affairs and to advocate for a more progressive politics continues. Cosmopolitans pursuing distributive or environmental justice, revisionists pursuing a less conventionalist just war theory, legal theorists pursuing the evolution of international community norms or global constitutionalism see potential in key aspects of the international legal order and often rely on legal responsibility – on already agreed and institutionalised norms – to ground their arguments. Yet real progress is hard to find. This chapter argues that normative international political theory (IPT) and its focus on moral responsibility has an important contribution to make here. The question of the relationship between moral IRresponsibility and legal IRresponsibility is the core focus of the chapter. The relationship between ethics and law has been the context for some vital work in contemporary moral and political philosophy. IPT has drawn inspiration from legal theorists thinking about the evolution of the international community and the move from bilateralism to community interest norms (see for example Fastenrath 2011). It is now quite commonplace to see political theorists relying on the power of jus cogens norms, erga omnes obligations and non-derogable human rights to point to the ways that international law is becoming more receptive to and more fertile for cosmopolitan ideas. However most legal theorists working in this vein, while clearly cosmopolitan or solidarist in their political sympathies, are relying upon social constructivist theory to ground their arguments. The sociology of the international community provides a promising context but arguments about the morality of the international community still need to be developed. If we are going to take seriously the potential for international law to further a progressive politics the relationship between the two needs to be theorised to help us think through questions of moral motivation, judgment and to confront those many hard cases that arise in practise. It is here that constructivist (post-foundational) IPT has a contribution to make to the debates that are well advanced in social constructivist IR and legal theory. In exploring IPT’s engagement with the relationship between moral and legal IRresponsibility this chapter critically explores some of the more promising lines of enquiry in contemporary debate and argues that rethinking the relationship between morality and international law is essential if we are to push beyond the IRresponsibility that characterises too much in global politics.
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The Assigning and Erosion of Responsibility for the Global Environment Steven Bernstein International environmental norms have articulated common responsibilities of states toward each other in protecting and sharing access to the global commons and carving out sovereign responsibility for use and protection of their own resources, with some minimal liability for external harms of pollution that affects other states. However, early ideas of “shared responsibility” for the Earth and the global commons, articulated at the 1972 Stockholm conference, and of the “common heritage of [human]kind” in treaties such as the Law of the Sea and early rules around plant genetic resources, largely failed to translate into specific obligations. Major developed states resisted specific obligations or global schemes for joint responsibility because they sought disproportionate benefits from exploitation of resources given their power positions and economic goals. Meanwhile, developing countries argued for differential responsibilities rooted in arguments around historical injustice, while rising economies sought to leverage their political and military power to support differentiation and reinforce their legitimacy and status as leading states among developing countries. The compromise norm of “common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities” that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s has come under increasing strain as the international system has become more multipolar along both political and economic dimensions. Rising economies especially, with increasing capabilities and who contribute significantly to global environmental problems, face growing pressure to take on more responsibilities. The result is not only further erosion of notions of “common” responsibility, but also a shift in understandings of differentiation to focus less on justice and more on capabilities. This contribution to the handbook will document these trends and examine the following implications: 1) An erosion of state responsibility for the environment generally; 2) Ongoing contestation over the meaning and implications of responsibility, particularly over its relationship to justice; 3) Trends toward the diffusion of responsibility not only horizontally among states but to non-state actors that have weakened notions of responsibility overall; and 4) A shift from external to internal responsibility where states are increasingly responsibility for their own environmental and development outcomes. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change and new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are two prominent examples that illustrate these trends, for example through ideas of country ownership, nationally determined commitments, voluntary national reviews in the case of the SDGs, and movement towards goals, benchmarks and best practices generally and away from binding obligations. Finally, various more radical proposals for redefining responsibility and entrenching new norms will be explored, including proposals for an “environmental responsibility to protect” (Conca 2015) and for adapting ideas and processes of transitional justice to reconcile notions of justice, accountability, and responsibility, especially in climate governance (e.g., Klinsky 2017). The Moral Geography of Responsibility – Spatially Differentiated Practices of Responding to Collective Problems in the Global Agri-food System Tobias Gumbert & Doris Fuchs This paper argues that in global food governance, how political responsibility is understood and put into practice largely depends on the ways discursive strategies frame and problematize objects of responsibility and devise corresponding solution strategies. Dominant discourses in the food system create a moral geography of responsibility – a set of expectations that links geographical ordering with morally adequate behaviours – that prescribes the forms responsible
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agency can take in particular spatial contexts. The range of possible governance responses to a particular problem is thereby narrowed, often benefiting the interests of powerful actors who are able to shift certain risks upstream and downstream along food value chains, thereby rendering less powerful actors accountable for mitigating the negative effects of collective problems. Empirically, the paper looks at the role of transnationally operating retail companies within the global governance of food waste. In the UK, retailers used to position food waste as an issue caused by ‘wasteful’ consumers, suggesting education and information campaigns to rationalize consumer conduct. By now, these supermarkets hesitantly start to admit that they share responsibility for globally rising levels of waste, yet voluntary measures exclusively address national consumption contexts. In relation to African food producers, European retailers still set specific trading standards and buying contracts that force suppliers to bear the costs of waste, creating large mismatched incentives that cause ecological, economic and social problems. These spatially differentiated practices of moral agency – sharing responsibility here, shifting responsibility there – are discursively legitimized by particular food system logics, global development norms and differing meanings of waste. In this paper, we show, specifically, how different notions of responsibility are selectively applied (and to what effect) by transnational retail companies in the agri-food system, and, more generally, how responsibility is mediated and shaped by field - specific discursive mechanisms that vary across time and space. Business and Human Rights in Global Governance David Jason Karp This chapter tracks the emergence of businesses ‘responsibilities’ for human rights—in relation to the duties and responsibilities of states—as they have developed within the United Nations system over the past twenty years. The first section surveys the ways that businesses have impacted on what we now call human rights throughout history, in order to evaluate what, if anything, is truly ‘new’ about global governance initiatives today. The second section maps the key contours of a distinction between ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘business and human rights’. The third section looks at the 2011 United Nations Guiding Principles on Human Rights, in order to evaluate the conceptual work being done by distinguishing businesses ‘responsibility’ to respect human rights from states’ ‘duty’ to protect human rights. This way of distinguishing ‘duty’ from ‘responsibility’ goes with the grain of the conclusions of the first two sections in some ways, but against the grain in others. The fourth section evaluates current developments in this area, in particular: a UN attempt to create a new binding treaty on business and human rights; as well as states’ national human rights action plans. Accountability and Responsibility in the Multilateral Development Banks Susan Park This chapter examines the ways in which the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) are accountable and responsible for their actions. The MDBs provide loans and assistance for development projects and programs in developing countries. As international organisations the MDBs are immune under international law. This raises questions as to whom, by whom, for what, and how they can be held to account. Scholars examine whether IOs can be held to account through the principal-agent contracts or systems of representation of their member states. Presumably, IOs can be held to account for meeting certain standards of behaviour or face with sanctions ranging from financial prudence, ethical conduct, and guidelines and
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policies for development lending. However, the practice of establishing post-facto accountability mechanisms within the Banks (both horizontal and vertical) for assessing whether the Banks are responsible and answerable for their development actions may not be linked to sanctions. In other words, states can request answerability but they may have little means to ensure the Banks are responsible. This raises questions as to whether the Banks are able to hold themselves responsible and answerable for their actions. Responsible Diplomacy: Restraint, Compromise and Polylogue Markus Kornprobst Is responsible diplomacy just about pushing for the short-term preferences of the entity (usually states) to be represented or is there more to it? Drawing from Realist, Liberal and Constructivist literature on diplomacy, my argument endorses the latter. Responsible diplomacy is about restraint, compromise and polylogue. Restraint is produced and re-produced by deeply seated aversions against the use of force, compromise by enlarging time horizons, package deals and skilful chairpersonship, and, finally, polylogue by open rather than closed rhetorical practices. In today’s diplomacy, polylogues and compromises become increasingly elusive and even restraint appears to come under pressure. This poses growing challenges to building and re-building international order. The discursive construction and contestation of responsibility between the UN and Regional Organizations Mitja Sienknecht Responsibility has long been a central principle of political action guiding the relationship between states and their national population. However, in light of globalization processes, we observe a diffusion of responsibility in world politics. Besides states, other actors such as international institutions assume responsibility in certain policy fields. Responsibility in international politics consists of the relationship between a subject, an object, and a normative reference framework. The current global order is characterized by the UN as the main international institution (subject) responsible for the maintenance of peace and security (object), based on the UN Charter (normative reference framework). However, the UN Security Council is not the only relevant institution when it comes to responsibility in the field of security. In line with Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, which provides for a close cooperation, regional organizations (ROs) have gained relevance in recent decades. Frequently, the UN attributes responsibility to ROs in the field of international security, for example by mandating peacekeeping operations, mediation processes, and the implementation of global norms over the course of these processes. This paper focuses on the regional embeddedness of ROs and their potentially differing regional set of normative stances, and aims to detect possible contestations in the process of responsibility attribution between the UN and ROs. By analyzing the discursive construction of responsibility in the official documents of the respective organizations, I want to contribute to a conceptualization of responsibility as a multilevel and discursive process that entails several loops and negotiation processes between the regional and the global level.
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A responsibility to freeze? The Arctic as complex object of responsibility Mathias Albert & Sebastian Knecht Most objects of international responsibility discourses are either rather specific in functional terms, for example a specific conservation regime, or extremely broad and global, such as in references to planetary climate change or human rights issues. The Arctic fits nowhere and everywhere in this respect. On the one hand, regions are usually not, or only in a very specific sense, the object of responsibility discourses. On the other hand, the Arctic touches upon, and links together, an extremely broad range of responsibility discourses on different scales, from the very local to the global. Melting sea ice refers to discussions about global climate change, linked with images of the polar region as one projection point of the ‘global exotic’. On the other hand, to name but a few examples, discussions about raw material extraction touch upon responsibilities in relation to environmental protection as well as energy security, and changing local living conditions touch upon responsibilities in relation to local/indigenous identity and autonomy. The present contribution will contribute to the debate on ‘IResponsibility’ by demonstrating the complexity of responsibility discourses when overlapping and referring to an international region as an object. It is both a mapping exercise of these discourses in relation to the Arctic, and thus a contribution to polar social science, as well as a modest intervention into the wider debate on the applicability and analytical usefulness of the concept of responsibility in IR. Responsibility on the High Seas J. Samuel Barkin & Elizabeth R. DeSombre Over the past half century, the norm governing economic activity on the high seas has changed from open access to collective responsibility. The ocean commons were once the object of individual acquisition, where states and people competed to access fish or other resources and disposed of waste without regard for the broader collective effect. Gradually, across a varying set of ocean resource and pollution issues, a norm of collective responsibility has developed. It is contested in practice. The collective action problems that are made worse in the context of rival resources means that uneven acceptance of responsibility both fails to protect the resources in question and harms the further development of the norm. The creation and implementation of this norm also faces a multi-level game. In some cases the norm is created at the interstate level and propagates downward to individual behavior (though unevenly); in other cases, it is influenced initially by individual normative pressure that works its way upwards to influence state behavior. In both cases, there is an interaction between the self-interest and normative pressure that can either reinforce or undermine the idea of responsibility, since the successful implementation of collective responsibility can benefit all who make use of the resources, but free-riders can both benefit from and prevent the full realization of collective responsibility. Nevertheless, the dramatic shift from open access and a race for resources to the widespread acceptance of at least the principle of collective responsibility is a major change in how the world has approached ocean resources.
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Responsibility as political beauty? Derrida’s ethics of decision and the politics of responding to others Stephan Engelkamp The proposed chapter discusses possibilities and limits of responsibility in world politics. It starts from the assumption that ‘acting responsibly’ towards others presents one with an impossible problem. Given constrained time and resources, to whom do ‘we’ respond and how? Which issues and who merit ‘our’ responsibility, and whose questions may (necessarily) be neglected? Starting from Derrida’s writings on ethics and responsibility, the paper enquires the moral underpinnings of taking responsibility towards the other as an ethical and political concept. It critically engages ethical accounts of making a decision in International Relations and the moral implications of the concept of aporia for responsible politics. Following a theoretical discussion of the relationship between responsibility, decision and sacrifice, the specific aporias of responding to others are illustrated through the example of European immigration policy. The German performative art group Center for Political Beauty highlights ethical dilemmas of making a responsible decision vis-à-vis the refugee crisis. While the artists’ performances aim at formulating a utopian alternative to neglecting the suffering of others, this chapter argues that they also demonstrate the limits of sustaining responsible politics. This became visible in the actual German response to the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. To Whom The Earth Calls: actor-hood, responsibility, and creation care Patrick Jackson In the era of anthropogenic climate change, we are told, taking care of the planet and its systems has become a inescapable imperative. "The environment" serves as a warrant for all manner of claims on our lives, and not just one warrant among others. Backed by the full authority of the natural sciences, the protection of the environment has become a cause that we can only completely reject by also rejecting, or at least contesting the authority of, natural science itself. And accepting environmental protection as an obligation often seems to elevate natural science to a controlling position in our lives -- a position that raises the familiar specters of disenchantment and purposelessness. I argue that this unfortunate situation results from a category mistake, a misleading equivalence between the kinds of explanatory warrants that natural science provides and the kind of affective and effective warrants from which practical action arises. Planetary systems science can tell us how to manipulate factors so as to achieve different ecological outcomes, but it cannot make us *responsible for* achieving any of those outcomes. Becoming responsible, becoming the kinds of actors who are responsible both individually and collectively for the outcomes of our practical activities, is a social process in which our very actor-hood is changed. To be responsible means to be addressable in obligatory ways, which in turn means inhabiting a morally charged cosmos within which we find purpose, rather than a morally neutral universe exhausted by facts and strategies. Responsibility for the planet can never be a simple consequence of planetary systems science, but depends on finding and making ourselves in and in terms of narratives like those found in a variety of religious and spiritual traditions which might be loosely gathered under the heading of "creation care." First I canvass discussions in the philosophy and sociology of science in order to establish the distinction between the morally neutral activity of producing scientific knowledge, and the morally charged activity of narrating ourselves as responsible actors. In the era of climate change, that means narrating ourselves as addressable by, and obligated to, the Earth -- and that,
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I will argue, means treating the Earth as capable of addressing us. This does not necessarily mean treating the Earth as a *person* in the manner of some strains of deep ecology and Gaia-pantheism, but can also mean treating the Earth as *created* rather than as merely existing. This is not typically the way that climate protection regimes and agreements are framed, as I will also show. And this creates a liability or gap that we should take seriously in thinking through the challenge of climate change. Academic Intervention: Contestation as Political Practice Antje Wiener
This chapter develops the argument for academic intervention through proactive contestation from a normative standpoint of responsibility. It defines contestation as a political practice of intervention. Different from deliberation which takes place in a privileged negotiation setting that provides access to government representatives, contestation is based on the quod omnes tangit principle (what touches all must be approved by all) and therefore accounts for access of all affected stakeholders. Against this background, academics have a special responsibility to intervene when political agents threaten to undermine the moral reach of fundamental norms by frequent often discursively sustained breaches of these norms. The chapter develops an argument in favour of responsible academic intervention in order to counter the event of global norm conflicts that are triggered by strategic political interventions in the global universe of political discourse by a plurality of agents. To that end, it draws on contestation theory and its application in the field of norms research. Based on the distinction between to reactive (objection) and proactive (critical engagement) contestation, the political practice of academic intervention is essential for the social constitution of legitimate normative order in world society. The argument is illustrated with reference to current normative crises in world politics.
For example, in the early 21st century, the public is frequently told that there is an ‘upper limit’ of fundamental norms, for example when politicians speak about human rights, the right to asylum, free movement and so on. These interventions in everyday political discourse suggest that norms can be curtailed according to political or other constraints. They reassure the public that fundamental norms can be ‘tailored’ or ‘created to fit’, as everyday politics requires. Against the background of norms research, these interventions represent the potential threat of curtailing normativity (i.e. undermine sustainable normativity in a given context through normative down-sizing). At the same time, they also present theopportunity to counter this threat and re-establish normative legitimacy through political intervention. This opportunity is rarely acknowledged and therefore remains to be seized. In sum, the chapter makes two main contributions: first, it addresses the responsibility to intervene for academics who provide the tools to do so; and second, it develops this argument with reference to the theory of contestation which defines proactive contestation as a political strategy.